Terry Rooney: I thank my right hon. Friend for that answer. Does he agree that the British troops are doing a superb job in southern Iraq, particularly on regeneration; and how does he see that process spreading to the rest of the country, particularly with the advent of the new Government?

Peter Tapsell: Does the Secretary of State confirm the estimate by the head of the Iraqi intelligence services, General Shahwani, that the number of insurgents has grown to more than 200,000, of whom about 40,000 are hard-core members and the rest are active supporters? If that is the case, what will the military situation be in future?

Adam Ingram: The deployment of British forces to Afghanistan as part of the international security assistance force helps to create a more secure environment, enabling the Afghan Government to take the lead in countering narcotics activities. That contributes to a wider interdepartmental approach co-ordinated by the Afghan drugs interdepartmental delivery unit, involving the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development, Customs and Excise, MOD and Home Office.

David Cairns: No one could possible doubt the tremendous effort that British and American troops are putting into the reconstruction of Afghanistan. We know of the increased supply of heroin on Britain's streets, but is not the other side of the equation the massive profits of the industry that support narco-terrorist activity, which represents the single biggest danger to the future of a stable, democratic Afghanistan? That, at least, is the warning from President Karzai. Is it not time we realised that along with the carrot of alternative livelihoods—which we are absolutely right to offer—must go the stick of destruction, in the form of a beefed-up crop eradication strategy?

Geoff Hoon: Under the four nation memorandums of understanding, a decision regarding the third tranche of Eurofighter Typhoon is not required before 2007. Discussions with partners and the aerospace industry about tranche 3 will therefore continue.

Adam Ingram: The Ministry of Defence provides a high standard of support to legitimate defence exports. In recent years, it has helped the UK defence industry to win orders worth, on average, some £5 billion annually. Major achievements last year included the contract for the sale of Hawk aircraft to India; and last month, the US101—a version of the well-established AgustaWestland EH101—won the competition to replace the current US presidential helicopters. The defence ministerial team has played an important part in helping the industry to win these orders.

Adam Ingram: I did cite two very good examples of the great benefits of such major procurements, not just in terms of what the companies in question have delivered for our armed forces, but of our ability then to market those products internationally. The same point applies to the Typhoon, although I know that other parties oppose our efforts in that regard. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats, who are probably the prime opponents, totally oppose such efforts to sell British industry abroad. My hon. Friend has raised an important point, and we are putting every effort into ensuring that we continue to get the best equipment on time, and for the best value. We believe that the British industry has the capacity to do that, and we will assist it in selling those products on.

Paul Flynn: How much income was derived from the rent of military land on Salisbury Plain in each of the past five years.

Paul Flynn: The latest figure works out at a mere £43 per hectare, which is a ludicrously low rent compared with that charged by the local authority of four times that amount—and that is a subsidised rent. It is decreasingly likely that the Army will use that rented land, because the nature of modern warfare means training for a peacekeeping role, rather than for gaining territory. Should not a fair market rent be charged on behalf of the taxpayer, or the land be sold to the farmers?

Hilary Benn: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I wish to make a statement about the Commission for Africa.
	"African poverty and stagnation is the greatest tragedy of our time."
	That is the conclusion of the Commission for Africa's report, which was published on 11 March. Seventeen commissioners appointed by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister—the majority of whom are Africans—spent the last year assessing evidence and reaching out to the continent of Africa. We talked and listened to ordinary Africans, politicians, leaders of regional institutions, business people, trade unionists, academics and religious and civil leaders. We were supported by an outstanding secretariat, to which I pay tribute, as I also do to many hon. Members on both sides of the House who took such an interest in the commission's work. The report is the richer for all those contributions.
	We live in a world of increasing prosperity, in which more people around the world share every year, but one continent—Africa—has been left behind. This year, 4 million African children will die before their fifth birthday. Millions more who survive will not go to school and will grow up to lead lives of abject poverty and frequent hunger. As the Prime Minister said on Friday, that is the fundamental moral challenge of our generation.
	The report is painfully honest. It tells the truth about the corrosive effects of corruption and conflict in Africa. It tells the truth about the things that Africa needs to change. It is equally honest about the past broken promises of rich countries and about the things that we must now do. It also recognises, however, that there are signs of hope. There is more democracy in Africa than before. More Governments are trying to do the right thing by their people. There are fewer conflicts. In some countries, economies are now growing strongly for the first time in years, and poor people are being lifted out of poverty. And best of all, Africans are taking responsibility for Africa, with the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa's Development—NEPAD—having set out the continent's vision of its own future.
	The report is clear that more ad hoc initiatives are not the answer. It sets out a comprehensive plan of action for implementation by Africa and by the rest of the world. It shows that Africa can absorb much more aid and can put it to good use to rebuild basic health care and education, to help countries scrap user fees that stop poor children going to school or poor families getting medical care, to assist in the fight against HIV and AIDS, and to reverse the decline in investment in water and sanitation. Aid to Africa should be doubled and made more reliable. The international finance facility should be launched immediately. For poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which need it, there should be 100 per cent. debt service cancellation as soon as possible.
	The future of Africa lies, rightly, in the hands of its people and Governments. While Africa acts, as it must, to improve governance and tackle corruption, rich countries need to stop holding back Africa. We must make the international trade system fairer and end the damage that export subsidies are doing, while Africa increases its own capacity to trade. To do that, and to increase economic growth, Africa needs major investment in infrastructure. Leaving it to the private sector alone has not worked, so the report recommends a new $10 billion dollar a year infrastructure fund, alongside proposals to improve the investment climate in Africa and to boost agriculture.
	Finally, the report recommends support for the African Union's new leadership in peace and security and for Africa's increasingly important regional institutions, and it proposes a new monitoring mechanism to hold the world to account for implementing what the report tells us needs to be done.
	The Government are committed to playing their part in responding to the report. We have already set out a timetable to reach the United Nations 0.7 per cent. aid target, and we are leading the world with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor's proposals on the international finance facility and on multilateral debt relief. We are on course to double aid to Africa by 2010, and we will need to do more to support good governance and tackle corruption.
	This is not a report, however, to the UK alone; it is a report to all of us. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is committed to putting the commission's recommendations before our G8 colleagues and to doing so with determination. To succeed, we will need to harness the energy of all those who share the report's vision.
	Most important of all, this report shows us that something can be done. It tells us how, and what it will cost. We—this generation—can no longer claim that we did not know about the condition of Africa or what to do to help it to change its future. Our challenge now is to do it. If we fail to act, as Africans or as the rest of the world, those who will come after us will ask how it was that people who were so aware of the suffering and so capable of responding chose to look away. If, however, we do act, we will help to build a safer, more secure and more just world. The choice is ours, and it is by the decisions that we make that we will be judged.

Andrew MacKay: May I put it to the Secretary of State that his response to my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan) was uncharacteristically disappointing, and give him an opportunity to put the record straight? Surely it is not colonialist or imperialist to criticise corruption in Kenya or abuse of human rights in Zimbabwe; and surely our excellent high commissioner to Nairobi was absolutely correct robustly to point out that even the fresh Government in Kenya have been very weak on tackling corruption.

Hilary Benn: I hope that the hon. Gentleman has noticed that this Government are the first ever to commit to a timetable for reaching the 0.7 per cent. target. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced last summer, we have set a date of 2013. The hon. Gentleman looks surprised at that. One of the reasons that we are in the current position is that, for 18 years, the Overseas Development Administration GNI figure for Britain fell from 0.51 per cent., where the Labour Government left it in 1979, to the 0.26 per cent. that we inherited when we were elected in 1997. That is not the way to go.

Hilary Benn: I agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of the European Union playing a part. That is why one of the issues that we are discussing is a new EU aid target, which will contribute to the pressure to be put on the G8 countries before Gleneagles. He also made an important point about examples of success; Africa is a many-splendoured continent. There are problems there, and we referred to some countries in that regard in earlier exchanges, but other countries are making remarkable progress. Mozambique is an example that illustrates the importance of peace and stability. Having been through a terrible conflict, it is now in the process of reducing poverty and has a number of donors backing the plan that its Government have drawn up to do that. That shows the potential that exists in Africa as well as the problems, and it is important that we focus on both.

Harry Barnes: My right hon. Friend said in his statement that there was more democracy in Africa now than before. That is welcome, but is he aware that democracy is about much more than votes? The civic society provisions mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Dumbarton (Mr. McFall) are part of that, as are civil liberties. How do we help to build a grass-roots Iraq? Tackling poverty is part of creating conditions in which people can implement democratic provisions, but should we not be helping people to make advances in their democracy, rather than imposing sanctions and specifying no-go areas for aid?

Ruth Kelly: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
	When this Government took office in 1997, standards in our schools were too low. Almost half of primary schoolchildren left school not reaching the expected standards. Work force morale was disappointingly low, schools were starved of the investment that they needed to flourish, and the entire schools capital programme stood at less than £700 million. Teachers and children were expected to learn in schools that were literally falling apart at the seams.
	Recognising the importance of education, the Government have worked with heads, governors and teacher unions to create a more stable system—a system in which standards are continuing to rise, we have a more diverse work force more suited to meeting the needs of our children, and resources have been put in to help meet those needs. Above all else, we aim for a system where every child is given the tools to reach their full potential at the earliest possible stage.
	We took that challenge as our No. 1 priority, introducing the national literacy and numeracy strategies early in our first term of office. As a result, we have seen the first step change in primary standards for more than 50 years. About 78,000 more 11-year-olds left primary school last year having achieved the expected level for their age in reading and writing than did so in 1998. That means 78,000 more children given a greater chance of success at secondary school and beyond.
	With the vital support and help of the majority of teacher associations, to which I pay tribute today, we established the national work load agreement. The sort of changes and standards that we want require the very best school work force—one that is better qualified and more flexible to meet the changing demands of children in schools. As a result, by January 2004, there were 28,500 more teachers in our schools and 105,000 extra support staff. We are rewarding success. The average classroom teacher's salary is more than 15 per cent. higher in real terms today than in 1997, and a top head teacher's pay more than one third higher. The chief inspector has now recognised that we have best qualified work force that we have ever had.
	Nor have we been complacent on investment. We have established the largest ever capital investment programme for our schools and will invest £17.5 billion in school buildings over the next three years, with the aim of transforming every secondary school in England. Investment in revenue has also risen dramatically. By 2005–06, our schools will have seen a £1,000 increase in funding per pupil in real terms since 1997.

Ruth Kelly: I did not make the figure up. It is a figure that comes from the Centre for Policy Studies, and it relates to the impact that the pupil passport will have on the state school system, as the hon. Gentleman funds education for the elite few while taking funds away from the majority.
	We have seen the results of our investment in schools and our reform of the secondary and primary school systems. Over the past eight years, there has been a 15 percentage point improvement in the number of pupils achieving expected standards for their age in key stage 2 English tests and a 12 percentage point improvement in mathematics. Our 10-year-olds are now the third best readers in the world. Since 1995, the standards in maths reached by our 10-year-olds have improved more than in any other country. Indeed, the chief inspector, David Bell, wrote in his annual report this year:
	"The English education system has not stood still but has instead continued to strive for further improvement."
	At secondary level, there are now fewer than 80 schools where less than 20 per cent. of pupils leave with five good GCSEs. When we took office, that number was nearly five times higher. The chief inspector says that parents can have more confidence in the education that their children receive than ever before.
	How, then, does the Bill carry us forward? It introduces three-year budgets for schools, offering unparalleled financial stability and giving governors and heads the scope to plan ahead with greater certainty. It reforms the Teacher Training Agency, giving it responsibility for the continuing professional development of teachers and in the training and recruitment of support staff. The Bill also provides further opportunities for the National Assembly for Wales to build on its proposals, helping to take forward the Assembly's 10-year strategy for comprehensive education and lifelong learning. There are other important and valuable measures, too, which I commend to the House.
	The fundamental reforms concern school inspection and school standards. The Bill transforms school inspection. We inherited a system in which a typical secondary school was inspected once every six years. With the Bill, that will be every three years. Schools now receive six weeks' notice of the inspector's visit. With the Bill, the school will receive next to no notice. Inspections will be "take us as you find us", rather than done when the coal has been whitewashed. A typical secondary inspection currently uses 50 inspector days. In future, inspection will use 24 inspector days, halving the cost and enabling Ofsted to reduce costs by £40 million.

David Chaytor: Following the Government's commitment to the 14-to-19 phase of education and their response to the 14-to-19 working group, would not it be more logical to have a common inspection framework that covered both schools and colleges? The improvements and changes to the schools inspection regime that my right hon. Friend is outlining are broadly welcomed by everybody concerned. Am I right in thinking that consultation on a common inspection framework for colleges finished on 31 January, and can my right hon. Friend tell the House when she is likely to be able to respond to that? Does she see convergence into a common inspection framework for the whole 14-to-19 sector?

Tim Collins: I think that I heard the hon. Gentleman clearly, and he said that some schools did not have telephone lines. Anyway, we have made progress and we all agree that in the 21st century, even under a Labour Government, schools have got telephone lines. Indeed, more and more of them are getting broadband, which is even more important.
	We also need to recognise that, although the Secretary of State started with a long list of achievements in recent years, that must be balanced by recognising that, sadly, a number things have not improved in recent years at all. Assaults on teachers have increased since 1997. Violence in schools is up by 50 per cent. Drug use among school-age children has doubled since 1997. The Statistics Commission recently said specifically that Ministers should not overstate the extent to which the national literacy strategy has made any difference to the improvement in the reported figures that relate to literacy for younger primary school children, yet the Secretary of State, once again, seems to have defied precisely that advice. The National Audit Office recently pointed out that the Government have spent £885 million in the past eight years on anti-truancy initiatives, yet truancy has not improved; indeed, on the Government's own figures, it has worsened by a third in that period.
	The Secretary of State said that one purpose of the Bill is to get rid of bureaucracy. We are all in favour of that, but which Administration, more than any other in British history, have introduced bureaucracy, interference, second-guessing and measurement in respect of our schools? It is this Administration, and after 10 separate pieces of education legislation since 1977, of which this Bill is the 10th, we must judge the Government not by what they say, but by what they have done.
	I was sorry that the Secretary of State found herself taking part in the campaign of what can only be described as smear, fear and, indeed, outright invention that is being pushed by some other members of the Cabinet. When challenged twice by me on whether she could come up with the words of a single Conservative Front Bencher or a Conservative document that would justify the repeated claims that we are committed to taking a £1 billion from the schools system, she could only retort that she had got a quote from an independent think-tank. That is not the way in which such debates ought to proceed.
	Indeed, the very policy that we advocate for our education system, which is that money provided by the taxpayer should be spent on behalf of someone else free of charge to that person, is precisely the policy that the Government are introducing in the national health service. Would the Secretary of State say that an NHS patient treated free of charge, paid for by the taxpayer, represents money taken from the NHS? I suspect that some Labour Back Benchers might take that view; I am absolutely certain that her Cabinet colleagues would not, so I hope that we will hear no more of that assertion.

Tim Collins: Again, I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to point out that what the shadow Chancellor said most recently, for example, on the Frost programme yesterday—the hon. Gentleman may have seen it—was that we propose to save 2p in the pound of what is presently spent, bearing in mind that the Government have increased overall Government expenditure by about 80 to 90 per cent. Contrary to what the Prime Minister and Labour Members often imply, the vast majority of public expenditure is not on schools or hospitals. We could not only preserve the entirety of those budgets and grow them significantly, but find massive savings elsewhere. As my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) pointed out yesterday, we could start by stopping the Department of Trade and Industry spending £120,000 over two years on potted plants. We could move on to getting rid of 168 quangos.
	The Labour party must be clear about this. It is putting on its websites the claim that the Conservative party is committed to removing £35 billion from public services. That is the statement. However, we should bear in mind that £23 billion of that £35 billion is actually part of the Gershon process, so is the Labour party taking the view—[Interruption.] The Secretary of State says that the Government propose to reallocate that £23 billion to front-line services. So do we. The difference between us is only £12 billion out of £600 billion of total public spending, and, with that £12 billion, we propose to plug £8 billion of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's vast black hole of borrowing and reduce taxes by £4 billion. If she and Labour Members honestly believe that the public believe that 100p out of every pound are currently well spent and that we could not save 2p, she and her colleagues will be in for a sad process of disillusionment at the general election.

Tim Collins: I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
	Let us move on to the Bill. The Secretary of State will not be surprised to hear that the Bill is something that we can welcome. It would be a bit odd if we did not welcome it given that very large parts of this huge Bill involve re-enacting without amendment previous pieces of Conservative legislation. The Bill looks substantial, with 128 clauses and 19 schedules. What a testimony to the diligence, effort and original creative capacity of the Secretary of State and her team—one might think. However, sadly, one finds that the Education Act 1996, which the Bill repeals, is re-enacted word for word in clauses 1, 3, 4, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 47, 48, 50, 51 and 57 and in schedules 1, 2, 3 and 4. There is an equally long list of word-for-word transpositions in the Bill from the Education Act 1994, which it also repeals. Given that 79 per cent. of the Bill's text is lifted word for word, clause for clause and schedule for schedule from legislation that was put on to the statute book by the last Conservative Government, of course Conservative Members are unlikely to oppose it. However, it shows that there is not a great deal of originality and creativity in the eighth year of a Labour Government.
	There are a few new measures in the Bill about which I shall talk, but we must put that in context given that four fifths of it simply puts back on to the statute book what was there anyway. What an extraordinary waste of parliamentary time. The Government said in recent days and weeks that there was insufficient time for the proper consideration of the Prevention of Terrorism Bill or the European constitution, but they have found enough time to re-enact, word for word, measures that already exist, which make up 80 per cent. of the Bill.
	Let us move on to one or two of the new measures that the Government have included in the Bill. About a week or so ago, we heard from the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State about the importance of parent power. We were told that parent power would be at the heart of their vision for the future of the UK education system. Parent power was going to be the way in which standards in schools would be driven up and something that would uniquely distinguish the Government from any of their predecessors. However, the Bill will remove the right of parents to meet Ofsted inspectors. It will scrap the annual school parents' meetings and remove annual school reports to parents. That does not sound much like parent power to us.
	As is normal in such circumstances, the Bill has been improved during its passage through the other place, which is where it was introduced. Two important measures have been added as a result of amendments that Ministers in the other place resisted. In particular, the Bill now requires parental consultation to occur before the closure of small, rural primary schools. As a result of the Government's defeat in the other place, parental consultation will be required before the closure of special schools. Given the Government's rhetoric about parent power, we hope that the Secretary of State will accept those amendments—even though her colleagues in the other place resisted them—and that the provisions will be included in the Bill that finally completes its passage through the House.
	I welcomed the fact that the Secretary of State talked about her wish for greater freedom for schools. The Bill will result in a little extra freedom for schools at the margin. However, that must be set in context by the fact that the Government's first action on coming into office in 1997 was to remove grant-maintained status from all schools without any consultation with parents, many tens of thousands of whom had voted in parental ballots throughout the land so that their schools could become grant maintained. Even after the Bill is enacted, supposedly freer foundation schools will lack many of the basic freedoms enjoyed by schools with grant-maintained status, which we propose to give to all schools without exception, or the wider school freedoms that we would like to introduce.
	The so-called self-governing schools that the Government propose will not have the absolute freedom to decide whether they wish to expand. It is all very well for the Secretary of State to say that she does not want to stand in the way of those schools, but she does not propose to give them the power to take such decisions. They will have no power over admissions and there will be no change to the local authority controls over their funding mechanisms. They will have no control over exclusions, or their own right to set up a sixth form. Even city academies will have less freedom under this Government than they will under a future Conservative Government.
	We welcome the Government's proposals to change the structure of local education authorities. Such change is a step in the right direction, but as usual it is half-hearted and belated.
	It was interesting that the Secretary of State did not mention in her speech one of the measures that the leader of the Labour party general election campaign apparently wanted to put at the heart of the Bill: the new power for local education authorities to invite new providers to come along to have a look at whether they want to set up a new school. I wonder why. I suspect that it was partly because she felt that her own Back Benchers—those few who turned up—would not be strongly in favour of the proposal, and partly because she knows that it will make no real difference to any significant number of schools. As long as it remains for local education authorities to determine whether they want a new non-state provider in their area, non-state provision will remain a theory, not a practice. There is certainly no proposal to introduce a statutory right to supply for new providers of education, which the Conservatives propose to introduce straight after the general election.
	The Secretary of State briefly mentioned the national literacy strategy. The Bill might not be the legislative vehicle in which to address such matters, but the Conservatives are wholly convinced—not least because of the splendid efforts made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb)—that a national literacy strategy that does not have phonics at its heart is a strategy that will not succeed in the way that today's children and future generations have every right to expect.
	Sadly, the Bill constitutes a series of missed opportunities. Even though it is an education Bill, it contains no provision for teacher protection, including a statutory right of anonymity when facing an allegation of abuse. It contains no provision to give head teachers the final say on exclusions, or to give the Secretary of State an unambiguous power to impose a moratorium on special school closures or for parents to be involved in that process. It does not create a school expansion fund and thus makes no progress toward a genuine right to choose.
	The Government still believe that a public sector monopoly, driven from the top, is the best and only way of providing education—even though that flies in the face of the experience in every other field of human endeavour and the example of a number of other European countries. The Secretary of State, like her predecessors, believes that she knows better than head teachers how to run their schools, how to impose discipline and how to control budgets. Perhaps that is why she got such a rough ride from the Secondary Heads Association.
	Much is being done well in Britain's schools, but a great deal could be done a lot better. Tinkering at the edges will not work, still less tinkering by a Government who have clearly run out of ideas and are running out of time. It is time for action on school discipline, parental choice and professional freedom, and the Conservatives will provide it.

Barry Sheerman: Now that I have got that off my chest, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall get straight into the Bill.
	The Bill is the legislative vehicle for the provisions of "A New Relationship with Schools". It also has an interesting relationship with the "Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners". I have to tell the Secretary of State—once she has finished her little conflab and bad behaviour on the Front Bench—that some of us in the education sector are a little bemused by the fact that there is not more of the five-year strategy in the Bill. There is a general thrust in the five-year strategy towards greater choice and allowing schools to become foundation schools with much more independence and autonomy. We would expect that to be made explicit in the Bill, as the stated aim of the Government's policy is to free schools from bureaucratic burdens and to provide greater school autonomy.
	This is a quiet little Bill in some senses but a momentous one in others. Given developments in the education sector and the direction of Government policy, one can see that a great deal of the architecture and infrastructure of education is changing dramatically. It is therefore important during the Bill's progress through Parliament that we are aware of the fundamental changes that it will bring about. As Chairman of the Select Committee on Education and Skills, I know that when it is suggested that there will soon be a general election one tends to have a lot of planes in the air that one has to land before it is called. I spent a busy weekend dealing with the final drafts of a number of reports that impinge on Government policy in the Bill. A number of themes emerge from a range of reports on 14 to 19-year-olds and the early years, the Green Paper "Every Child Matters", and the secondary schools review over the past 18 months. The Government believe in greater co-operation between schools, and in giving schools a collegiate structure.
	In her very first speech as Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, West (Ruth Kelly) emphasised to the north of England conference the importance of good behaviour by children and students, and talked about the need to tackle problems by establishing partnership and collegiate schools. I, for one, was inspired by her remarks, as not only did she propose that a group of schools would collaborate to tackle poor behaviour but facilities to do so would be provided. The umbilical cord linking pupils and students to the school would remain intact, so there would be a core responsibility, whether the student was in a pupil referral unit or on work experience.
	The notion of collegiate is associated with Tim Brighouse—the Select Committee saw the very good work that he is doing in Birmingham and he is also the inspiration behind work in London. Collegiates, co-operation, partnership and the specialist school agenda link together to make a broader choice in the curriculum available to a greater number of students. I am not sure that that ties in with another strand in Government thinking about providing greater independence for schools.
	Although it is included in the five-year plan, the Bill does not make include provision for schools to obtain foundation status after a single meeting by the governors. After deciding that they want their school to have foundation status, the governors can move on to owning their own buildings and land and gaining a great deal of autonomy. There is a tension in Government policy between those two ideals. Do they complement or compete with each other? The Government should be aware that many people in the education world wonder how those tensions will resolve themselves, but it is an important issue to consider as we begin our deliberations on the Bill.
	Another respect in which the Bill is deceptive is the momentous impact that the Children Act 2004 will have on the Department for Education and Skills. It marks a dramatic change in the education infrastructure of our country. Until a recent meeting with the Local Government Association, I did not realise, and as Chairman of the Select Committee, I was rapped over the knuckles for not realising, that local education authorities no longer exist. That is a momentous change. It does not mean that local authorities do not have responsibility for education, but as the LGA said, it no longer refers to local authorities as LEAs, and any literature from the Committee that did so would be incorrect. LEAs are now local authorities with responsibility for the Children Act and for many other aspects of education, but are no longer the traditional local education authorities.

Barry Sheerman: I was teasing the Secretary of State to come back with an answer as to which is right.
	There are two aspects to the architecture of change—the role of local authorities and the independence of schools, and inspection. Many of the provisions in the Bill for more streamlined inspections have been called for by the Select Committee for some time. We welcome many of the changes in the inspection process. There is no doubt that an inspection process that has been in place for 12 years needs to be adapted to new circumstances. Most people will welcome lighter inspection and more rapid and regular inspection.
	There is to be much greater emphasis on self-evaluation and self-improvement. As the House heard in my intervention on the Secretary of State, there is some concern about getting self-evaluation right. Even in the pilot areas, there have been cases where schools have gone in for rigorous self-evaluation and found themselves utterly vulnerable when the inspectorate focused on the weaknesses identified by the school, which some schools felt was rather unfair.
	There needs to be an understanding of the self-evaluation process, how it can lead to self-improvement, and how that will mesh into the new system of inspection. That balance will have to be worked out over time. I asked the Secretary of State what measures were in place to raise the level of knowledge and introduce training for self-evaluation. The experience of the 100 pilot areas and good practice must quickly be disseminated to all the thousands of schools that need to know how to play the new game.
	Over the weekend, when I looked at the reports that the Select Committee will soon be completing, I was struck by the vast number of inspections and inspectorates in the local authority education sector. We interviewed some of the people involved in those during our inquiry into the Children Act 2004. There are undoubtedly great sensitivities between bodies such as the Audit Commission, the social services inspectorate and Her Majesty's inspector of schools, and those will not be quickly resolved. There have been many attempts to get a working agreement to ensure that there will not be over-inspection of local authorities whereby several departments are inspected by Ofsted, and then the Audit Commission comes in to inspect the same departments. We must be very careful about the amount of inspection. That has become much more complex since the introduction of the 2004 Act, and most of the people to whom I speak, whether in the country or in this House, do not understand its ramifications or just how much difference it makes to the responsibilities of the Department for Education and Skills, which is the lead Department.
	I was a little disappointed when the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale seemed to put so much faith in getting rid of potted plants in the Department of Trade and Industry as a way of helping with the cuts in public expenditure that have been much vaunted by the shadow Chancellor. However, I too have some concern about the role of parents. There is no doubt that parents seem to be losing some of their rights in terms of Ofsted inspections—namely, their annual meeting and annual report. Let us be honest about this. We all know that the Conservative Government's original legislation on annual meetings has been disappointing. It may be an old-fashioned way to do things. I know that many schools around the country are deeply disappointed about the amount of parent participation that comes through those more traditional methods. Perhaps it would be better to use the internet or questionnaires, but the process has to be fully worked through in a positive spirit to ensure that parents are closely involved. I am not one of those who believes that the whole answer lies in parent participation—it does not.
	Last week, I spoke at the Royal Society of Arts about designing decent schools in view of the massive expenditure on new school buildings that the Government have embarked on. As someone who is very interested in design and architecture, especially its sustainability, I am keen, as are the RSA, the Design Council and others, that the quality of the new build is good—that it will not only last for a very long time but will be exactly what the people who are educated in those buildings will enjoy.

John Pugh: The Bill does not set the pulse racing, which is probably why most hon. Members so far have preferred to talk about something else. It was well summarised by the Conservative Lord Hanningfield, who described it in the House of Lords as
	"a Bill which appears to be a large compendium of different issues without . . . truly innovative ideas within it".—[Official Report, House of Lords, 13 December 2004; Vol. 667, c. 1099.]
	Perhaps we should not regret the lack of innovation. Innovation is good in schools and in teachers, and perhaps in local education authorities, but probably not in Governments coming up to an election wanting to create eye-catching headlines and capture cheap votes.
	The Bill is certainly a compendium; the noble Lord was right in that regard. It is a piecemeal affair, with a number of hastily added clauses and schedules. We can almost see the draftsmen adding bits on here and there as they went along. It is the product of at least four different forces: the wild ideologues of No. 10; the Department for Education and Science, which has a slightly better grasp of real-time education; the educational world and its lobbyists; and the wise counsel of the noble Lords. All four have had an input. I do not want to over-stress the role of the noble Lords, because they have had enough flattery lately and there is a danger that they might become seriously vain.
	The Bill is a curate's egg; it is both good and bad. The good is fairly evident and has been mapped out already in this debate. The Bill introduces a more frequent inspection regime with a lighter touch, which is good. Although Ofsted has done much good in sharpening focus and procedure in schools, we should not forget its past failings. Assessors should always be assessed and, when possible, made accountable. Ofsted, particularly under its previous chief inspector, Chris Woodhead, ran a reign of terror without adequate appeal. I know from personal experience that it drove good teachers out of their chosen profession and saddled all teachers with an absurd bureaucratic role.

John Pugh: The official Opposition are not averse to kamikaze tactics. I can assure them that that simple announcement has lost them the vote of every teacher in the country in one fell swoop.
	To return to the issue of bureaucracy, most schools not only have inspections of inordinate length but hire consultants to do pre-inspections, which adds to the overall cost and bureaucratic burden. Overdosing on inspections without first demonstrating the need for them is a mistake that the Government make over and over again. Best value in local government is another example of such bureaucracy. An equivalent situation in the medical world would be a doctor who dealt with every ailment by first giving the patient the maximum dose of a drug, and only reducing it over a period of time, or who sawed off a limb before considering applying a plaster.
	The changes proposed in the Bill are predictable, and the Government should probably apologise for introducing them as late as this. However, it is too late for some schools. In relation to Mr. Woodhead—the Pol Pot of the inspection world—I was given the example of Islington Green school, which complained about the chief inspector's judgments in 1997. In that year, Chris Woodhead overruled a unanimous decision by a series of inspectors that the north London comprehensive had passed its inspection, and declared it to be failing. It has taken eight years and the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to disclose what the staff and pupils knew all along: that the school was improving. A team of Her Majesty's inspectors sent to the school on behalf of Mr. Woodhead to carry out a corroboration visit unanimously backed the view that it was not failing. None the less, Mr. Woodhead went ahead and put it on the list of 265 schools requiring special measures. That is not an encouraging precedent, but it is encouraging that the Tories see a future role for the gentleman.
	A change in model is proposed, coupled with a saving of bureaucracy and the ending of pre-inspections, which schools cannot do all the time, as there would simply be no point. I do not know whether short, sharp, unheralded inspections will be less frightening for schools, but there is the promise that they will be more constructive. Some of the comments of the Secretary of State move in that line. The Bill still provides a key role—I thought that I would talk about the Bill—for HMIs, and a residual role, as I understand it, for LEAs' inspection, too, which can perform a positive role.
	There is no evidence that the Government have learned a great deal from history, however, and those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It would be remiss of me not to mention that school inspections have a long history in this country. The 19th century poet, Matthew Arnold, was a school inspector—I ponder how much poetry is in the soul of the current school inspectorate.
	None the less, the range of inspections, including nursery, careers, child minding, independent schools and religious education, is well mapped out, and we have no particular objection to such a range. What is at issue—and what has not been entirely clear so far—is the manner and objectives of such inspections. Perhaps the whole issue was left deliberately cloudy. We are broadly sympathetic, however, to the changes in that direction. We are broadly sympathetic to the reduction in categories of failure, and to the strange inclusion, for this Government, somewhere in the Bill in relation to Wales, of a reduction in the Secretary of State's power in relation to inspections. That is the first time in the House that I have seen a Secretary of State's power reduced voluntarily.
	I want to flag up one issue that might create problems later. The Government are now giving a green light, in a sense, to further sixth-form expansion where there is some sort of demand, and where schools have proved their ability. That will almost inevitably lead to smaller sixth forms that do not provide the full range of subjects for pupils and their parents. In those circumstances, there will be more scope, not less, for examining sixth forms.
	The Bill contains other proposals to which we have no particular objection. A hooray is due for the abolition of parents' meetings. I say that as someone who was once on an LEA and examined the absolutely dismal turnout at those meetings. Contrary to what the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins) thinks, LEA after LEA has asked the Department whether it can stop this charade, as it is not how parents wish to be involved. Various recipes have been tried to get parents more involved; they have persistently stayed away. In one school that I examined, one parent and a whole phalanx of governors attended the meeting. When I inquired as to why that one parent had come, I was told that, coincidentally, that parent was the caretaker and had to come. That shows the support for such meetings in many places.
	We are generally fairly neutral on whether to change the governors' report into a profile, as it could be the same thing under another banner. Three-year funding, varied with data, is quite a reasonable idea. In that proposal, however, it seems to me that No. 10 wanted its pound of flesh. It seemed to want a move towards equalisation of funding, and there might be some hidden agenda in that regard. The current arrangements are subtly changed. At the moment, as I understand it, there is core LEA funding in addition to discretionary LEA funding taken from or recharged to the schools, with the Government specifying the overall spending level. The legislation seems to put in a hurdle whereby the school forum's approval must be secured. I presume that that idea has crept in from No. 10. The LEA can appeal to the Secretary of State, however, if it is not satisfied. It strikes me that such sophistication is not necessary and does not add a great deal to the process.
	The Bill deals with two aspects of school organisation, the opening of new schools and the rationalisation or closure of existing schools. In the context of the opening of schools, the LEA is largely being reduced to the status of promoter—the decision-maker being the school organisation committee, the Secretary of State being involved whenever the magic word "academy" is used, and the adjudicator being the final point for appeals. That is how the system operates, but given that it is bounded by the Secretary of State's regulations in the first place, what we have is a process that an authority can start but cannot subsequently control, and ultimately must fund. That regime is well established by the Bill.
	On school closures, the Government have been very bold—I would almost say reckless: brave, but foolhardy. They will give directions to LEAs and foundation schools when there seems to be overprovision, without of course mentioning individual schools. If they are not satisfied with how the process is evolving, they can take it over. Many Governments in the past have thrown on local authorities the onus to make all the unpopular decisions, and perhaps I should praise the Government in this instance for having taken some of the burden of unpopularity on themselves. It is possible that they are serious about falling rolls, and want to address what could be a considerable issue for the country; it is also possible that they will live to regret what they are doing.
	There is an animus against LEAs in this and the previous Government's legislation, which was reflected in the comments of the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale. If LEAs did not exist, however, it would be necessary to invent them. They have a hugely important role to play in quality control, behaviour support and so on—a role that the Government are not entirely capable of playing, and perhaps are not competent to play. Hon. Members will recall that a few days ago the former Minister for Schools, the hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Miliband), was chastised by Mr. Speaker for misbehaviour in the Chamber. In those circumstances, we cannot have a great deal of confidence in the Government's ability to address issues of behaviour.
	LEAs, it seems to me, are supporters of schools, co-ordinators of schools and sources of innovation for schools; but, crucially, their role is to guarantee that no child in a given area fails to receive a proper entitlement. They are guarantors of equal provision. No free market, no anarchy, no competition will fulfil that role. The unjustified erosion of LEA powers is regrettable, but it is argued for. LEAs are given targets and duties, but in no sense are they given enhanced powers.
	The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) mentioned allowing public-school governors to get their schools to opt out of the LEA family simply by means of a vote, without even the democratic procedures that the Conservatives built into the opt-out system. That is a regressive step. During the opt-out procedure, the governing body of a school in my LEA, in what was once my ward, chose that route. There was a vote by parents, which—in a middle-class area in which the governing body might have expected to succeed—contradicted the governing body. That school has gone on to be extraordinarily successful. It has well-behaved children and high standards, and is very much part of the LEA family.

John Pugh: What the Government are doing, and what the Conservatives never did, is disempowering parents whose children attend a school and preventing them from making a decision on behalf of that school, while allowing a limited number of governors to make decisions that might have radical consequences for the educational picture in their area.
	Finally, I turn to an issue that detained their Lordships a little: the role of the General Teaching Council. The GTC as defined in previous legislation was set up to give a professional image to a heavily unionised profession, and the model was the General Medical Council. The GTC tried to acquire a role in the educational environment commensurate with the initial definition of its functions, but this Bill allows teachers in academies not to belong to the GTC. As a result, the GTC is to some extent losing its real role and the reasons for its creation are largely being forgotten. If this compendium of legislation is to contain a measure that works against other legislation, the compendium will be very muddled.

David Chaytor: This is not the most exciting or radical Education Bill of recent years; nevertheless, it contains a number of sensible proposals and certain principles on which there is now broad-based consensus. I simply want to make some general observations about some of the Bill's implications. Frankly, nobody is going to object to the new inspection proposals, and I commend Ofsted and the current chief inspector on the drawing up of his new inspection framework, which responds sensitively to the criticisms of the old regime of terror to which the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) referred.
	However, the issue of inspection does give rise to certain questions. Mention has already been made of the extent to which all—or even most—schools are fully prepared, through their self-evaluation procedures, to take on greater autonomy in this regard. There is also the question of the role of school improvement partners, and of the Ofsted system in England, which traditionally involves purely inspection and accepts no responsibility for following up criticisms made during the inspection process. Perhaps we could learn more from the system that applies in Scotland, where inspection and follow-through are seen as part of a continuous process. I urge the Secretary of State and the Government to take on board what happens in Scotland.
	Nobody is going to object to the change to the name of the Teacher Training Agency or to the introduction of three-year budgets. The tragedy is that we have not had such budgets in our schools for many years, and I commend the Government on finally getting to grips with this issue. But I should draw attention to an issue that might affect some of the local authorities—they include my own in Bury—that were the biggest losers under the old standard spending assessment system. By and large, those at the bottom of the funding league table under the SSA system welcomed the change in the formula introduced two years ago and the move to formula spending share. Generally speaking, the authorities that lost out under the old system made gains under the new one, but some—including my own—found that the full gains to which they were entitled did not follow through because of the introduction of floors and ceilings. My local authority claims to have lost several million pounds to which it was entitled under the new formula, which it has still yet to receive in grant allocation.
	Will the move not only to three-year budgeting but to direct central control of budgeting ensure that authorities that should have gained under the move from SSA to FSS will get the full gains to which they are entitled? I raised this issue with the former Secretary of State for Education when he responded to the phoney funding crisis of two years ago and decided that direct funding from the centre was the way forward. Everyone will doubtless agree that it would be completely unjust if, when we had moved to a fairer system, some authorities still did not get their full gains because of the additional move to a highly centralised system.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I remind hon. Members of the nature of today's debate. I call Mr. David Chaytor.

David Chaytor: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
	I shall move on to the two issues to which I really want to draw attention. First, one reason why the Bill is spectacularly consensual is that many of the Government's more radical proposals of recent times do not need current legislation. The principle of schools becoming foundation schools by a single vote of the governing body, and last autumn's consultation document, on shifting the presumption in favour of the opening of new sixth forms, could have radical implications for the structure of our school system and colleges. Moreover, the major decisions on the curriculum have been taken through the Government's response to the 14-to-19 working party's recommendations—so the interesting thing about the Bill is that the really radical changes to our secondary school system's funding, structure and curriculum have all taken place outside the Bill.
	The Government have made their decision on Tomlinson, and I hope that there will be a further chance to come back to that issue in the 2008 review. But I urge them to look particularly carefully at the responses to their proposed presumption in favour of the opening of new sixth forms, which has the potential massively to destabilise the provision of education in certain areas. If the preference or ambition of a particular school or head teacher were to lead to the opening of a new small sixth form without reference to the pattern of education in a particular area, that could prove destabilising and could actually work against the Government's declared intention of bringing about greater co-operation between schools in order to implement the full implications of the new 14-to-19 curriculum.
	I now turn to my second major observation. Although I appreciate the extent to which, as the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins) pointed out, the Bill is designed to repeal earlier legislation, many of its clauses seem to have been conceived in advance of the Government's decision to establish a clear 14-to-19 phase of education. I referred to inspection during an intervention on the Secretary of State at the start of the debate. If we are to have a unified 14-to-19 phase of education—and if students in the 16-to-19 phase can be in school or in college, and which type of institution they find themselves in is just a matter of historical or geographical accident—it is surely self-evident that subjecting those schools and colleges to different inspection regimes is an enormous anomaly. There can be no logical argument for continuing with two separate inspection regimes. Once we have decided on a unified 14-to-19 phase of education, it follows that inspection of the institutions that are co-operating to deliver that phase should be carried out under a unified framework.
	I make a similar point in respect of the training and development agency. It is obvious that students pursuing the same course in adjacent districts or even within the same district could be taught either by a secondary school teacher or a further education teacher, yet it remains the case that the secondary school teacher will be subject to the new Training and Development Agency for Schools, but the further education teacher will not. How can the same teachers working with students on the same courses find themselves ineligible to take advantage of the same professional development opportunities? I believe that the Government should revisit the issue of whether the new body should cover both school teachers and FE college teachers.
	Staffing is a related matter. Some clauses bring about new requirements to provide more accurate monitoring of staffing in our secondary schools, but the same requirements do not apply to staffing in FE colleges. The reality is that since 1993, successive Governments have said that the staffing of FE colleges is not a matter for the Government, but entirely for the individual college corporations. That cannot be sensible when—I reiterate the point—we have a unified curriculum. Where is the sense in collecting statistics on staff teaching GCSE and A-level courses in schools without collecting them on staff teaching similar courses in FE colleges?
	I want to draw attention to some of the implications of foundation status for all schools. I vividly recall the Education Reform Act 1988 and the opportunities offered to schools to become grant maintained. My argument then, as chair of an education committee that faced the prospect of being the first local education authority in the country to implode because of the pressure of so many schools opting to become grant maintained, was either that the legislation allowing grant-maintained status must be abolished or that all schools must be allowed to become grant maintained. I am delighted that, 17 years on, the Government have now finally accepted that we should not have a two-tier system in which special funding privileges and special autonomies apply to certain schools but not to others. The Bill makes it clear that all schools will be eligible for foundation status.
	I question whether everything that the Government are doing is moving in the same direction. Alongside the move to greater autonomy and managerial devolution, we also have a parallel movement towards recognition of a much greater need for co-operation. The Government's argument in putting the case for the growth of specialist schools is that such schools will need to co-operate with other specialist schools to provide a rich curriculum and staff development opportunities. In response to the Tomlinson report and the 14-to-19 working group, it was argued that in future, schools would have to take collective responsibility for the progress of pupils in a given area. It is increasingly likely that individual pupils will attend different schools to take advantage of a particular specialism, or attend schools or colleges for curricular reasons.
	If we are giving schools greater powers of autonomy and greater independence, but also saying that they will have to co-operate more closely with each other in order to provide the full range of the curriculum for 14 to 19-year-old students, there is clearly a tension between those two proposals. I wonder whether the Government have fully thought through the implications of the new autonomy. What incentives will they offer schools to co-operate in the recommended way?
	That issue is highlighted above all in the matter of the school's autonomy on admissions. As the law now stands, if 3,000 secondary schools all become foundation schools, we will have 3,000 new admissions authorities. If we think about the war on bureaucracy, I would have thought that there was no argument whatever for increasing the number of individual admissions authorities, which would inevitably lead to a greater level of bureaucracy, form filling and needless paperwork. I am therefore flagging up the question of whether the Government have really thought through the implications of foundation status for all schools, in terms of every school becoming its own admissions authority.
	Broadly, it is impossible to take exception to the Bill, which moves our education system forward in the right direction. The Government's achievements over the last eight years are indisputable. It was encouraging to hear the official Opposition recognise—despite some nit-picking over statistics—the great improvements made to both primary and secondary schools. Parents in my constituency, however, will be unconvinced by the Opposition's assurance that if they ever come to power, they will not cut the education budget. Parents will not be convinced that under a Conservative Government it would be possible to sustain the year-on-year level of investment that this Government have sustained over the last eight years. The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale may think that an attack on bureaucracy and foliage may find the savings that he is looking for, but I do not believe that that is credible.

Nick Gibb: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor), but I have to shatter the illusion that no one objects to the Bill's provisions. I do object to some of them, particularly on inspection regimes and self-evaluation. It is terribly important to maintain a rigorous and independent inspectorate of our schools and I have serious concerns about the Bill in that respect. I share the view of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) about the behaviour of the Secondary Heads Association at its recent conference. It reflects badly on their profession and if those heads cannot even set a decent example, it will make it more difficult for them to maintain discipline in their own schools.
	I am continually struck by the cycle of decline in British education, which predates this Administration, but still flourishes, despite a lot of rhetoric to the contrary, under new Labour. How does the cycle of decline work? Those with an egalitarian viewpoint—alas, they still dominate policy making in the education world—introduce a reform, for example the AS-level as a component part of the A-level exam, in order to create an overarching exam that blends two different ability levels. That overburdens A-level students with too many exams, so to tackle the problem, they propose sweeping away external assessment at 16, replacing it with more self-evaluation and teacher assessment. Thank goodness the Secretary of State has rejected that proposal.
	Another example was the introduction of GCSEs in the mid-80s. Again, it was an overarching exam to encompass both CSE and GCSEs with grades ranging from A and now A* to G. Predictably, grades D to G began to be regarded as fail grades, so it was then proposed to return to separate level 1 and level 2 qualifications within the Tomlinson diploma proposals—essentially a return to the old distinction. The worst clauses in the Bill propose making more of such reforms.
	Ofsted was established in 1992 to tackle the very real concern that Her Majesty's inspectors were insufficiently robust in their opinions. There were concerns about the rigour and quality of their inspections. They were, as it was said at the time, the dog that did not bark in the night, and were too close to the Department of Education. That was why Ofsted was established as a non-ministerial department with, as the hon. Member for Huddersfield said, Her Majesty's chief inspector directly accountable to Parliament. I share his concerns about where that accountability rests under the Bill.
	It soon became clear that Ofsted's reports were rigorous and led to many schools having to reassess their quality of teaching. Most inspections were carried out by independent inspectors who were trained and registered as Ofsted inspectors, but were sub-contractors. My concerns about the Bill are that it means smaller inspection teams, led by an inspector, and that the chief inspector will be able to amend its reports. It also proposes to reverse the requirement to tender for contractors in respect of each inspection and removes the requirement to maintain a register of authorised inspectors. All that looks to me like a move to take inspection back in house, and to return, in other words, to the bad old days of HMI and the days of the curious incident of the dog in the night.
	I am concerned by the notion of the short, sharp inspection. Of course, over the years the bureaucracy of Ofsted inspections has increased, with schools being required by the Department and local education authorities to produce volumes of paper as preparation for an inspection. That was never the purpose of the rigorous inspection envisaged in the 1992 legislation. It is right, therefore, that the Bill introduces a shorter notice period for inspections to prevent that bureaucratic nonsense from occurring.
	It is not right, however, to reduce either the number of inspectors or the length of the inspection. Inspectors will, under the Bill, as the Secretary of State has confirmed, take no more than two days and will have smaller inspection teams. We are told that the inspectors will focus on the school's own self-evaluation evidence. As Lord Filkin said in the other place, schools will feed in their self-evaluation evidence to the inspection team, then inspectors will engage with the schools in a professional dialogue examining the evidence in support of the self-evaluation. Yet because inspectors will see little actual teaching during their inspections, there is little that the inspections will add to the sum total of knowledge about the school, other than in reprinting already available exam result data.
	In two days there will be very little time to obtain evidence to support or contradict self-evaluation. As Baroness Perry said:
	"The framework which has been piloted in the current year for the light-touch inspections smacks too much of bureaucratic ticks in boxes".—[Official Report, House of Lords, 13 December 2004; Vol. 667, c. 1133.]
	I share that concern. A rigorous, independent inspection of the quality of teaching in a school is to be replaced by a short bureaucratic box-ticking exercise.
	So the cycle of decline will continue. Every form designed to deal with the over-bureaucratisation of Ofsted inspections, which was never intended, has been hijacked now to emasculate the rigour and independence of those inspections. That matters hugely. In our system, schools are, in practice, unaccountable. The only real accountability were the Ofsted inspections and reports that received widespread local coverage.
	If a local parent is unhappy with the policies of his or her children's school, there is very little he or she can do. For example, if the head teacher of a comprehensive decides that all English lessons should be taught in mixed ability classes, who should local people lobby if they object? Do they lobby their Member of Parliament, who can then raise the matter with the Secretary of State? No. Questions of whether or not to stream are, it seems, matters for the profession—the head teacher and the governors of a particular school. Do parents raise the matter with their local councillor so that he or she can raise it with the council cabinet member responsible for education or with the director of education? No, and for the same reason.
	Key policy decisions, such as the degree of setting or streaming, which directly affect the quality of teaching in a school, are totally outside the democratic structures of the state. The only thing parents can do is to become a governor of a school. Most simply do not have the time to take on such obligations. In any case, there is real doubt—I know of no examples—as to whether a parent-governor would be able to change key policies, such as whether the synthetic phonics programmes referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins) are used to teach reading in primary schools or whether streaming should be reintroduced in a comprehensive.
	The only real accountability has rested with the Ofsted inspections, and the Bill effectively renders such inspections meaningless.

Mark Francois: I am pleased to contribute to this debate, because the Bill touches on a number of important issues, including inspections, teacher training and the development and supply of reports from schools to other bodies. Like all hon. Members here this evening, I recognise the importance of education for the future of our young people and thus for the country. I also appreciate and value the efforts of those who work in education, and I hope to raise a number of specific issues on their behalf this afternoon.
	I am pleased to see the Minister at the Dispatch Box, but I am surprised to see that the Labour Benches behind him are entirely empty.
	Like many Members of Parliament, I take a close interest in the schools in my constituency, all of which may be affected by the Bill, but in varying degrees. For example, its effect on secondary and primary schools may be slightly different and I shall speak about that later.
	Shortly after I was elected to Parliament in 2001, I set myself the challenge of visiting all the schools in my constituency, and I completed that task earlier this year. Of the 38 schools there, four are secondary schools—Sweyne Park and FitzWimarc in the town of Rayleigh, Greensward college in Hockley and William de Ferrers in South Woodham Ferrers—all very good schools. There is one special school, Ramsden Hall in Ramsden Heath, and 33 other infant and/or junior schools, most of which are very good. Two schools are in special measures, although at least one, which I had the privilege of visiting only recently, should soon be re-emerging from that status under new and dynamic leadership.
	During my visits to schools I try to chat to both staff and pupils and to have a detailed discussion with the head teacher, which includes some of the issues that we are discussing this evening. In that context, it is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb), who has taken a great interest in these issues for a number of years. If I may say so without embarrassing him, that was evident from the quality of his speech.
	On a personal note, my late mother, Anna Francois, worked for many years as a school dinner lady, so I often pop into the kitchen and try to talk to the kitchen staff to see how they are getting on. I hope that you will forgive me that small indulgence, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	The most revealing part of those trips has often been when I have been able to visit the staff room at break time, ask the staff to raise any issues of concern and give them an opportunity to "Jeremy Paxman" their Member of Parliament. A number of them have not been shy of taking advantage of that opportunity. On behalf of the teachers and heads I have spoken to, I would like to ask the Minister a number of specific questions, and I hope that he will provide some direct replies.
	The Bill has much to say about the inspection of schools against the national curriculum. I shall criticise the Government on a number of issues—for example, the lack of well-defined history lessons, which has featured in the media recently. However, in fairness and to be non-partisan, I give them credit for the emphasis that they have placed on citizenship in the national curriculum, which has all-party support, and I am sure that we are all in favour of school councils to teach children the value of democracy in action.
	Like many other Members of Parliament, I have spoken at a number of school assemblies on the roles and duties of MPs, and I confess that I have faced some challenging questions. I have encouraged schools to visit the Palace of Westminster to see our process in action. I genuinely believe that that is important, particularly in an age of falling voter turnout and when there are some people at the extremes of the political spectrum with ugly politics and for whom the democratic process is anathema.
	We must encourage our young people to be proud of their history, heritage and traditions, including the evolution of the mother of Parliaments. Whoever they vote for in future is their business, but it is crucial to teach them the value of our democratic system, for all its imperfections, so that they do not take it for granted. I really believe that.
	Perhaps more contentiously, I want to make a number of points about the inclusion agenda, which part 4 of the Bill touches on. I have discussed the inclusion issue in detail during a number of my school visits, and unfortunately the Government's approach is not working. Most of the staff I spoke to were sympathetic to the principle of trying to include children with challenges, whether medical or behavioural, in mainstream education. Again and again, they pointed out that this is a matter of degree and of providing sufficient resources to make such arrangements viable. In practice, that often means providing a full-time teaching assistant to keep an eye on a challenged child, which many schools cannot afford and the local education authority is often unable to fund.
	Moreover, it was put to me repeatedly that there are some children who because of their persistent bad behaviour are simply not suitable for mainstream education. I was given several examples, in several different schools, of children who were so disruptive that they effectively undermined the education of the other 29 children in the classroom, as the teacher and perhaps the supporting teaching assistant—if there was one—spent far too much time trying to control the one child, to the detriment of all the others. Several teachers said to me that when they had such a child in their classroom, they spent the whole lesson wondering when he or she was going to start playing up, and knowing that at that point the lesson would, effectively, be terminated. Even worse, the head teacher then often has to spend an inordinate amount of time liaising with the parents of the child and the LEA over a single case, as well as dealing with complaints from the other parents who that feel their children are missing out.
	Ministers have to accept that there are some children whose behaviour is so severe that they simply cannot be accommodated in mainstream schooling, and no amount of political correctness or soft-soaping can overcome that. That comes directly from several heads and teachers in my constituency, and I hope that the Minister will take my word for it. I believe that it is better to confront the issue honestly, and thus I favour our policy of "turnaround schools", which will focus on educating those resource-intensive children who have real behavioural problems in schools that are optimised to deal with those problems. That would have the additional benefit of allowing teachers in mainstream schools to get on and teach the well-behaved pupils in their classrooms. We do a disservice to the teachers, the well-behaved pupils and the children with the real problems if we try to pretend that the situation does not exist and to muddle through. We have to accept the world as it is, not as the politically correct—I do not include myself in their number—would like it to be.
	The Bill touches on the issue of bureaucracy, but it fails to confront it head on. I have sat in staff rooms and asked teachers and teaching assistants, "If there was one thing about the education system that you could change, what would it be?" Almost without exception, the answer is the paperwork. There is now so much paperwork that many teachers find it genuinely dispiriting. I hope to convey that to the Minister this evening. More than one in three newly qualified teachers now leave the profession within the first two years, many of them citing bureaucracy as their reason for quitting—although many now also cite indiscipline.
	Many of those who remain in the profession are becoming increasingly fed up with writing internal reports that they believe no one will ever read anyway. One deputy head I spoke to at one of my rural schools said she was planning to include the names Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in several of her forthcoming returns to the LEA to see whether anyone would notice. However, the whole system of depressing bureaucracy was best put to me on a doorstep in Ashingdon a few years ago during an evening canvass, when I spoke to one teacher who made the point to me so bluntly that I have never forgotten it. She said, "Look, if I had wanted to be an accountant, I would have trained for that, but I didn't—I wanted to teach kids. I am a professional, so just let me get on with my job." That has stayed with me ever since.
	Ministers keep making ritualistic gestures towards reducing form filling, but the blizzard of DFES circulars keeps coming. We are losing good people from the teaching profession—and it is a profession—because teachers are getting fed up. Ministers crow about the much vaunted 10 per cent. of non-contact time, but who will take the lessons in the teachers' place? I acknowledge that teaching assistants do a good job, but they are not qualified teachers. If I were a parent, I would not be happy with the suggestion that 10 per cent. of my child's maths lessons would not be taken by a teacher, because the teacher had to go away and fill in forms instead. Perhaps the Minister could say how the new arrangements will work, because that is a concern in several schools that I have visited in the past year.
	Head teacher work load is also an issue, and it will not be materially reduced by the 128 clauses of the Bill. The head teacher has to cope with more bumf than any other member of staff, especially in primary schools. With perhaps only a small senior management team to share the work load, the pressure on the head teacher is often very substantial. One primary school head explained that to me by writing out, off the top of her head, a list of all the plans and strategies that she had to produce, in addition to the everyday task of running her school. I kept her list and I have it here. It includes an overall primary strategy, which seems fair enough; a physical education/sport initiative, as part of a local sports partnership with other schools; a plan for e-confident schools; a healthy schools plan; an inclusion strategy; a modern foreign languages strategy; a work force remodelling plan; a work load initiative plan, including arranging and staffing non-contact time; a wraparound care plan; an initial extended schools plan; a school leadership and management restructuring plan; and a travel plan.
	That is a dozen different plans and strategies, each one in response to another bright idea from the Government, and each one requiring additional work by, primarily, the head teacher. I am not convinced that we really require all that information, but if we do, why could there not be just one overall school plan, for which each plan I have listed could be a separate annexe? That would mean less work and is a point that head teachers have put to me repeatedly. When I was in the Army, we were told that there could only ever be one plan at one time, because anything else led to confusion. That is also a reasonable maxim in this context. Many head teachers feel that they are drowning in paperwork and I am not convinced that the Bill will address that problem on the scale required, although I shall listen carefully to what the Minister has to offer.
	In my tour of local schools over the past four years, I have been to a number of wonderful schools. As just one example, the rendition of the "Well Done Song" at Riverside junior school in Hullbridge will live in my memory for ever. I shall not attempt to reproduce it for the House this evening, but it was a sight to behold. However, I have also found a number of heads, teachers and even teaching assistants who are fighting what they see as a losing battle against bureaucracy, and many of them are becoming dispirited as a result. Most of them joined the profession in the first place because they had a burning desire to educate children.
	The best thing that Ministers can do to re-enthuse those people is to stop second-guessing them and get out of their way. They should be able to concentrate on what they came into teaching for in the first place—to teach children. I hope that the Minister will accept that I have tried not to be partisan tonight, but to focus on some problems that have been raised directly with me. I believe that our plans for education would address many of those points more effectively than the Government's offerings, but I wish to hear the Minister's response, so that I can pass it back to some of those who have raised issues with me.

Kelvin Hopkins: I am pleased to have this rather unexpected opportunity to speak in the debate. I have a great interest in education in general, and in some of these matters in particular, as at one time I was a teacher. I taught A-level economics and politics, although in further education rather than in a school, and it was an interesting experience. Many of my close relatives are or have been teachers at various levels. I have a close involvement with all the schools and colleges in my constituency and I am vice-chair of the governors of our sixth-form college. I also spend an hour or so every year teaching a class myself, so I have some feel for what is happening on the ground, rather than just speaking from the lofty heights—the ivory tower—of Parliament.
	For many years, I have been concerned about what is going wrong in British education. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development statistics on educational achievement in Britain show a pattern different from that in any other country. The top 10 per cent. of our students do extremely well and compare to the best in the world, yet the bottom 30 per cent. of our pupils are near the bottom of the table. Our average puts us at a reasonable level in the OECD table, but our extremes are at opposite ends, and the bottom third is of most concern.
	When I was in teaching, inspection was not good. I entered teaching with a degree but no teaching qualification. When I was inspected, the vice-principal came in for half an hour and his only comment was that my writing on the board was untidy. That was not news to me, as I have always struggled with writing. That was the extent of the criticism of my teaching. Fortunately, I got good results and my pupils made complimentary remarks about my teaching relative to that of some of my colleagues. That was the nearest I got to proper inspection—inspection by my pupils rather than by a professional from outside.
	Inspectors were of various types. The teaching philosophy at the time was for informal methods, which had the education system by the throat—not a good idea, in my view. One of my associates taught in a very formal way, and when he was aware that the inspector was coming he got his pupils to put their desks into little groups and asked them to talk to each other while the inspector was in the room. The inspector thought that was splendid, but when he went away the teacher said, "Put your desks back in lines, be quiet and listen to me". The inspector was unaware that the teacher taught formally. That teacher was extremely popular with parents, because pupils learned much more in his class than in some of the other classes. So inspection was perfunctory and not very good. Some of the philosophies that were peddled by inspectors in those days clearly led to some of today's problems.
	Behaviour was not considered as a serious problem in those days. We have lived to regret that, because we have developed a culture of boisterous behaviour in schools, to say the least. The hon. Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) drew our attention to that fact. We now have to deal with that and row back from allowing classroom behaviour to get out of hand. When I was first elected, I suggested to a junior Education Minister that we should deal with such behaviour in the classroom, but the Minister said that that would be too prescriptive.
	I am glad that my hon. Friends who now sit on the Front Bench have a different view and that we are looking at classroom behaviour. I do not know whether this is true for other hon. Members, but I could never learn well in a boisterous, noisy atmosphere. I learned better in a quiet and orderly atmosphere. That sounds old-fashioned, but it seems obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense. However, that was not the situation in many schools for many years, and most teachers found it difficult to cope with that.
	Primary and secondary schools in my constituency have had problems. Four schools have been in special measures, but they have come out of them because of the efforts of some superb head teachers and some very good teachers. Many of them have moved towards a more traditional approach to teaching, which has been beneficial. I shall dwell on one school in particular, which was not in special measures but was not a star performer, although it was still a good school. It was part of the three-year pilot scheme for inclusion units, whereby pupils who misbehaved or found it difficult to behave themselves in class were taken out of the class and put into the inclusion unit, where they received perhaps one-to-one teaching until such time as they felt able to return to the classroom and behave.
	This year, that school was listed as one of the 100 most improved schools in the country, and it is not improbable that the inclusion unit had an effect. Pupils who had difficulties behaving themselves in class were taken out immediately so that the teacher could get on and teach the other pupils, and when they felt better about things they could return to the classroom. That has made a difference. It is fine school with a wonderful head teacher. I go there regularly, and it is a delight to see that it has done so well this year.
	I am glad that, under clause 44, the Government are rowing back a little from declaring too easily that schools are failing. The category for schools that look likely to fail will be removed, and in future only when schools are really failing will they be categorised as such. That is wise. As I have told Ministers in the past, we should not label schools before they get into difficulties but should be aware that they are not performing well and get resources into them early on, to start to improve them long before they start to fail. I want to press Ministers to take that approach: to look at schools that are not performing well, to put in resources and to make sure that those schools have the right management and head teachers, even if we have to pay them a little more and give them a premium for teaching in difficult areas, to ensure that those schools improve.
	The market approach of letting a lot of schools compete with one another and allowing some to fail and some to succeed is not only divisive but expensive and wasteful. I would prefer the resources go into making every school in the country a good school. That is not just a fair but an efficient way forward, and it would cost a lot less public money.
	What causes the problems in schools? Many problems relate to social divisions. Sadly, Britain is still a socially divided society—much more so than the continent of Europe. We have had an enormous variety of schools since the second world war—grammar, secondary modern, comprehensive, technical and faith—and each area now has a hierarchy of schools that reinforces those social divisions rather than cutting across them.
	I have suggested to my hon. Friend the Minister for School Standards, who recently left the Chamber, that if we approached education by producing a balance of population in every school and ensuring that every school is a good school, we might start to address those social divisions and divisions in education and make some progress in bringing Britain together as a society, as well as improving the educational performance of those at the bottom who have been doing less well.
	At the moment, we have hierarchies of schools, even in areas with a good education system, such as my constituency. Some schools are in areas with relatively poor living standards where people face a degree of deprivation. Of course, children from those areas perform less well at school. In other areas, we have magnet schools that are targeted by middle-class people, who move into the area and push up house prices. There is a little enclave of middle-class families, with middle-class children going to middle-class schools, and they all do very well. That is fine for them, but it is not fine for the 30 per cent. who do not do so well.
	We must deal with that problem and try to achieve a balanced population in schools. In most urban areas, that would not be too difficult because the distances involved are not great. When I taught 35 years ago, comprehensivisation was starting and there was an attempt to ensure a balance-of-ability range in the schools in some areas. Pupils were roughly categorised at the age of 11 into As, Bs, Cs and Ds. There was no 11-plus, but an attempt was made to ensure that schools had a balanced population.
	In those circumstances, a genuine comparison could be made between schools that were performing well and those that were performing badly. Value-added measures, as well as different teaching methods, could be compared in each school, and inspectors could make a proper assessment of how well certain forms of teaching were succeeding. If we do not do that, we will continue with a hierarchy of schools, which is socially and educationally damaging, thus reinforcing the social divisions that are so uncomfortable and disagreeable in our society.
	We want to avoid any kind of segregation along racial lines as well as those of social class. We also want a nice mixture of people in each school. Certainly in my constituency, most schools are like that. There is a tendency for one school to take more pupils from one community than another, but there is a mixture in each school nevertheless. I want that mixture to include the whole community.
	Finally, I want to discuss patterns of school provision in different areas.

Andy Reed: I apologise to the House for not being here at the start of the debate, but the Adjournment debate is about education funding in Leicestershire, and I hope to speak in it, so I hope that I will get a double go at talking about the issues. I am grateful to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins). I know that he is a fellow Leicester City supporter so, like me, he will be feeling very aggrieved by a late penalty decision in the FA cup.
	I wish to concentrate on two aspects of the Bill. The first is the inspection regime and the second is what are described as the small financial aspects—which I believe do not go far enough. I welcome the Bill as part of the wider package of reforms that were set out in a number of documents: "Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners", "A New Relationship with Schools: Next Steps" and the paving document on the learning country and a comprehensive education. Plenty of heavyweight tomes are flying around describing what will happen.
	The Government's stated aims and strategy sound extremely good. They are
	"to establish a new relationship between government and schools. The overall purpose of this strategy is to reduce the burden of bureaucracy for schools, freeing up resources within schools, enabling them to concentrate on the core task of delivering high quality education."
	It is on that point that I wish to speak from my experience in Leicestershire—not just as the Member of Parliament for Loughborough but as the parent of a child aged six who started school last year and a daughter who has just started free nursery education for three-year-olds. She will be three this Saturday. I have daily experience as a parent, and as the governor at a local primary school for several years.
	I visited all the 36 schools in my constituency early in my time in Parliament and have maintained a healthy relationship with all the governors and head teachers since then. Unfortunately, events in the House on Friday meant that I was not able to take part in an assembly at Burleigh community college, so I would like to place on the record my apologies to all the students there. They were really looking forward to my entrance with my red nose and red wig. That did not happen—much to my relief, if not theirs.
	It is important to concentrate on what is happening in schools, and that is why I referred to the Government's aims and strategy for education. Those all sound very laudable, but there are still problems at the grass roots in delivering many of the changes. When Ministers visit schools, the first issue that teachers raise is the paperwork and bureaucracy that goes with teaching these days. Ironically, when my wife was helping out in my local school, only last week, she walked into the staff room and saw a photocopied cutting in bold, large print about my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State's idea that teachers could give their pupils reports every six weeks. The feedback on that suggestion was probably not the most helpful that we have received. It is important for us to recognise the impact that such measures have on teachers and the enormous amount of excellent work that they do.
	I think that the number of teachers and teaching assistants in Leicestershire has risen by about 400 over the past few years, which is to be welcomed. I was pleased to hear that the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Rendel) spoke about education in his maiden speech 12 years ago. I made my maiden speech on the Bill that contained measures to reduce class sizes for five, six and seven-year-olds, and I am pleased to say that my son, who is at key stage 1 at primary school, is in a class of fewer than 30 pupils. I know that there are 24 children in the class, because I had to take sweets in today to celebrate his birthday last weekend, so I had to count out the right number for each child. Given my interest in nutrition and health, I should have taken in some fruit, but the tradition seems to be taking in sweets or cakes. I hope that we can change that over time.
	I spoke this morning at Loughborough college about a health initiative and felt guilty that I had taken those sweets in. However, I noticed that my pedometer showed that I had already done 9,000 steps by 10 am when I arrived to speak at the meeting. I am now up to 27,500 steps, so I have probably made up for the little packet of sweets that I had this morning with my son. One of the most welcome things that we have managed to introduce is nursery provision for three and four-year-olds, in addition to reduced class sizes for five, six and seven-year-olds.

Andy Reed: I am grateful for your stricture, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I shall not be led astray by my hon. Friends.
	I wanted to link what I was saying to an important point about the inspection of schools that came out of this morning's discussion. The matter has also been considered by the Health Committee. We are clear about what we know about children's educational and academic attainment through inspection, but we do not know enough about the physical activity that they are undertaking. I would like the opportunity to discuss the matter in Committee, because I would welcome the return of something along the lines of the health check. It would not be like the traditional health check that we lost 20 years ago, but a way of examining children's health by measuring their body mass index, and perhaps other aspects of their health.
	The main aspects of the Bill that I want to talk about are the inspection and finance regimes. I know from being a governor about the work and stress caused by the current inspection system, and I am sure that all hon. Members in the Chamber are aware of that. I was a governor of Sileby Highgate school in 1997 and we had an inspection several months after I was elected to the House. The whole regime seemed to revolve around ensuring that all the paperwork was in the right place to demonstrate that the paperwork was in the right place, rather than showing what the school was like on an average day. Since the inspection in 1997, I have argued for something along the lines of the system proposed in the Bill. Most teachers to whom I have spoken would prefer such a system. Shorter, sharper and more frequent inspections would be appropriate—but to go a little further, perhaps there should be no notice of when inspections will occur, especially if they are short. The preparation period for an inspection seems to be the most stressful time, because people have to try to ensure that everything is in place.
	I agreed with the hon. Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) when he talked about the number of plans and other documents that must be in place for an inspection. The walls of staff rooms tend to be covered with plans and documents, but one must wonder when they were last taken down from the shelf and referred to. I am sure that good teachers and heads read them regularly and know them off by heart—but to be realistic, I worry that the fact that there are so many such documents causes extra strain and pressure for teachers, because they must ensure that they are up to date.

Mark Francois: It was good of the hon. Gentleman to amplify the point that I made earlier, which shows that hon. Members on both sides of the House encounter such problems in their schools, and I was not making a partisan point. Does he agree that teachers, and especially heads, find it annoying that they spend a great deal of time producing those plans, but seldom get much feedback on them. They are not sure that the documents have even been read by the people to whom they send them.

Andrew Robathan: My Leicestershire neighbour is being incredibly loyal by coming to speak in this debate when he is to speak later about education funding in Leicestershire, but does the hon. Gentleman not think that he is being over-loyal with regard to the new funding formula? According to Leicestershire county council and the teachers with whom I have spoken, the proposed new funding formula will make matters worse in Leicestershire, which, as he is well aware, is the worst funded education authority in the country.

Andrew Robathan: Hear, hear!

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: The Minister will doubtless supply that information—it is not for me to do so. I did not write the Bill or the notes on clauses, but the Minister will surely give a more than adequate explanation of what it all means.
	I welcome one or two things in the Bill, particularly the protection for small rural schools. There are number of such schools in my constituency and they are vulnerable. Although they may have only one or two teachers and have difficulty in teaching the full curriculum, the dedication of the staff is welcomed by the pupils. As has been said by Members on both sides of the House, they offer a good service to the village, and help to keep it together. I also welcome the measures on special schools. It is a pity that it has taken the Government eight years to realise that such schools should only be closed in exceptional circumstances. I used to represent Tewkesbury, which is now the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson) and includes the excellent Alderman Knight school. Even though that school offers excellent education and steps have been taken to keep it open, it is going to close.
	The real mischief that the Bill will cause only becomes apparent in paragraph 261 on page 45 of the explanatory notes. I am concerned that the Bill will weaken the school inspection regime—the mechanism that provides independent measurement of one school's performance against another. Paragraph 261 states:
	"This Part makes changes to school inspections and the inspection of early years education provision. Ofsted anticipates direct savings of at least £10 million per annum in the cost of schools inspections".
	No one would worry too much about that, but the paragraph goes on:
	"Ofsted is reorganising to deliver the new inspection regime and this will reduce its staffing levels by some 500 posts".
	Either Ofsted has been grossly inefficient—that is not my perception—or a cut of that magnitude will decimate the school inspection regime. I should therefore be grateful for an explanation from the Minister. I should also like an explanation about the provisions on excluded pupils. I have referred to the 1 million children who are excluded every year. Paragraph 241 of the explanatory notes says that
	"pupils who are excluded from school for a fixed period or are appealing against a permanent exclusion cannot attend a school from which they have been excluded."
	That is self-evident. However, if the Minister would do me the courtesy of listening, the paragraph goes on to say:
	"As a result schools cannot direct such excluded pupils to attend alternative educational provision."
	It would be helpful to know why that is the case. The Minister is scowling, so doubtless he will provide an explanation.
	My main concern, however, is about funding for maintained schools and for further and higher education, on which there are a number of provisions in the Bill. Like the area represented by the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Reed), Gloucestershire is well within the bottom sector of the F40 group, because it has always been a low-spending authority. It is grossly unfair that one child should receive different funding from another child receiving the same education in broadly similar circumstances in a different part of the country. Whatever the nature of the Government in power, it is about time that we devised a fairer system for funding our children's education. I have long suggested that a basic amount should be allocated to every single primary and secondary child in the country. Thereafter, extra would be given for the normal criteria such as deprivation and so on. The formula would be transparent. That is not the case at the moment, and it is almost impossible for a parent or child to work out why their school has been given a particular amount of funding. It is surely possible to make the funding of schools more transparent.
	As for further and higher education, it is wrong that they should be funded differently from secondary education, as such institutions offer exactly the same A-levels or AS-levels. It is wrong, for example that Cirencester college, an excellent further education college in my constituency, should receive less funding per pupil than a school in the maintained sector. I trust that we will hear something about that in the Chancellor's Budget on Wednesday, but I certainly hope that the Bill will do something to address that difference in funding.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: With the greatest humility, may I suggest that if the hon. Gentleman had been here at the beginning of our debate and heard the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins), he would have learned a little more about Conservative funding? I know that he is very loyal and has come to the Chamber to make a contribution at the last minute, but he has read out a speech for another debate. He was quite rightly ruled out of order by the Chair. While I appreciate his intervention, we all know what the situation is.
	I have said almost enough. I started by talking about bureaucracy and gobbledygook in the Bill, and I should like to end with the same subjects. I refer the Minister to paragraph 218 of the explanatory notes, which says:
	"Subsection (4) allows persons specified in subsection (3) to supply information received under this clause from the Inland Revenue, Department for Work and Pensions or the Department for Social Development in Northern Ireland to any of the persons specified in subsection (5) for purposes relating to eligibility for education maintenance allowances."
	As the Inland Revenue is mentioned, will we receive information about people's tax returns? If not, what is being alluded to? The explanatory note continues:
	"It also allows those who have received this information to pass it on to those who are actually administering education maintenance allowance schemes. The intention is for the clause to facilitate a single information sharing scheme, enabling the Secretary of State, or any other person specified in subsection (3) to receive information on specific applicants directly from the Inland Revenue and Department for Work and Pensions on behalf of the other administrations and to pass it on to them so that they in turn can pass it on to those administering their education maintenance allowance schemes."
	That may be clear to the Minister, but it is not over-clear to me why the Inland Revenue is involved. I know what the Department is getting at. In relation to free school meals, it is necessary for the Inland Revenue to be involved. I urge caution on the Minister in that regard. Free school meals and parents who are on benefits are a very sensitive matter in schools. It is bad enough for some children to be castigated because they receive free school meals. It is even worse if their parents are to be investigated as to whether the children are entitled to free school meals. If that does happen, it should in no way involve the children. That could be extremely damaging.
	The Bill is not a particularly good one. It does not address the problems of our education system in 2005, which are deep-seated and require solutions. I regret to say that the Bill is not the way to solve them.

Mark Hoban: And the hon. Gentleman will note, if he reads Hansard carefully tomorrow, that I said almost glowing terms. That does not get away from the key fact that yet again, he did not talk about his party's plans to abolish Ofsted, so we wait with bated breath to hear in Committee what the Liberals' plans are for Ofsted.
	I shall comment on some changes to the inspection regime and Ofsted. The first is the change to the definition of special measures. The hon. Member for Luton, North commended the weakening of the definition set out in the Bill. At present, schools that are failing or are likely to fail can be put into special measures. The Bill waters down the definition of special measures. Schools that are likely to fail can no longer be put into special measures, and where a school has failed but has demonstrated a capacity to improve, it can avoid being put into special measures. The result will be fewer schools going into special measures, but that will not mean that fewer schools are failing their pupils. It seems that we must wait until schools have failed before we bring in the detailed intervention and support that Ofsted can give when schools are in special measures.
	We have spoken about the interaction between Ofsted and parents and the fact that the Bill moves away from the formal meeting between Ofsted and parents. One of my concerns is the lack of information to parents once a school has gone into special measures. I know of one parent who had to use the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to gain access to the subsequent Ofsted reports on their school. It is wrong that parents should have to resort to the Act to obtain such information. They should be able to have access to the reports without going down that route. If we are to extend choice in our schools, parents need to know what is happening in their child's school. Obtaining that information is bureaucratic, inappropriate and laborious.
	The Bill seeks to encourage greater choice and diversity in schools—a pale imitation of our own plans for the right to supply. There are proposals in the Bill to allow local authorities to invite promoters to come forward with proposals to run a new school. That is a modest measure. We will introduce proposals to give people the right to establish new schools, rather than having to seek permission to do so. I wonder whether the proposal in the Bill is yet another example of a Government who are all talk. When I asked the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon. Member for Halton (Derek Twigg) about the measure, he stated in a written answer:
	"The Education Bill currently before Parliament will extend the requirement for a competition to all new secondary schools, including schools replacing existing schools as a result of re-organisation."—[Official Report, 28 February 2005; Vol. 431, c. 939W.]
	Under "Building Schools for the Future", a whole series of new schools is about to be built. Will they be subject to the same power of competition that is set out in the Bill? The Minister needs to be very clear whether they will be open to the competition to find people who are prepared to take on those schools and to manage them. If that is not the case, these clauses, like other measures on school choice and diversity, are window dressing. The Government have form in this area. They talk a big story on choice and diversity but the reality is often somewhat different. When I asked how many competitions had been held by local education authorities for the provision of a new school since the powers were introduced, the Under-Secretary said—there will be no prizes for guessing the answer—
	"There have been no competitions for new secondary schools since the requirement for a competition for additional secondary schools was introduced in June 2003."—[Official Report, 28 February 2005; Vol. 431, c. 939W.]
	Yet again, we see measures in a Bill to introduce choice and diversity, and yet again we see no action on those areas.
	Another area where the Bill takes no action, save for the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends in another place, is that of behaviour. One of the areas of consensus in this debate concerns the declining standards of behaviour in our schools. This morning, I spent some time with head teachers from a range of schools in south Hampshire, from primary to secondary schools, and mainstream schools to special schools, particularly those teaching children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. There was a clear consensus in that meeting that behaviour was a growing problem from the primary stage right through to the secondary stage. If we are to raise standards in our schools, we must ensure that those children who want to learn can do so in lessons that are free of disruption from the troublemakers who prevent them from getting the education that they deserve and need.
	This Bill would have been the ideal opportunity to introduce measures to help to bring that about. The Government could have introduced measures to protect our teachers. A teacher is assaulted every seven minutes in our schools, but the Government do not bring forward any measures to help them. Once again, we have to rely on Members of the other place to introduce statutory duties to get the chief inspector to report on discipline and behaviour in school and to put pressure on the Government to ensure that it is a duty of the Training and Development Agency for Schools to ensure that the school work force are trained to promote behavioural development.
	Why have not the Government brought forward measures to strengthen the position of head teachers who have to make decisions to exclude pupils? In one Hampshire school recently, the head's decision to exclude a pupil who assaulted a teacher was overturned by an independent appeals panel. That head teacher's judgment was second-guessed, which undermined his authority, sent a clear message to pupils who wonder why children who disrupt lessons are allowed to stay there, and made teachers feel more vulnerable to attack.
	The Bill introduces no measures to tackle the problems that arise when false accusations are made against teachers. How many stories do we have to hear about teachers suffering from false accusations? False accusations destroy many teachers' professional and personal lives, yet the Government fail to act. No wonder teachers are losing faith in them. Our teacher protection Bill would give teachers anonymity when faced with an accusation until the point at which they are charged, sending a clear signal that Conservatives support teachers—that we are concerned about their safety and security and the threats that they face to their professional lives.
	As many hon. Members have said, this is a modest Bill. If it is passed before the general election, it will be a fitting epitaph to a Labour Government who came into office with bold promises for education but have delivered so little. There is little in the Bill for the teachers who are subject to an assault; little to tackle the 1.3 million children who truant; and little to help parents who despair of finding the right school for their child. It bears all the hallmarks of a Government who have run out of steam, direction and drive. It is time for a change in education. The people of this country want a Government who will put education at the heart of their priorities and will pursue the raising of standards of attainment and school discipline with drive, commitment and enthusiasm. It is time to give the people of this country that choice.

Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order 83A(6) (Programming of bills),
	That the following provisions shall apply to the Education Bill [Lords]:
	Committal
	1. The Bill shall be committed to a Standing Committee.
	Proceedings in Standing Committee
	2. Proceedings in the Standing Committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion on Thursday 14th April 2005.
	3. The Standing Committee shall have leave to sit twice on the first day on which it meets.
	Consideration and Third Reading
	4. Proceedings on consideration shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour before the moment of interruption on the day on which those proceedings are commenced.
	5. Proceedings on Third Reading shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at the moment of interruption on that day.
	Programming Committee
	6. Standing Order No.83B (Programming committees) shall not apply to proceedings on consideration and Third Reading.
	Programming of proceedings
	7. Any other proceedings on the Bill (including any proceedings on consideration of any message from the Lords) may be programmed.
	Question agreed to.

Northern Ireland

That the draft Budget (Northern Ireland) Order 2005, which was laid before this House on 9th February, be approved.—[Mr. Ainger.]
	Question agreed to.
	Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),

Northern Ireland

That the draft Public Processions (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) Order 2005, which was laid before this House on 22nd February, be approved.—[Mr. Ainger.]
	Question agreed to.
	Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),

Andrew Robathan: We have not yet heard all the debate on education funding in Leicestershire, notwithstanding what was said earlier by the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Reed), who I know intends to take part in the debate. I want to welcome in particular the presence of my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan), who is concerned about the issues that I wish to raise.
	I welcome the fact that the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon. Member for Halton (Derek Twigg), will respond to the debate. It is probably an old joke, but I suppose that he is part of a branch of Education Ministers, given that I was expecting his namesake, the Minister for School Standards, the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr. Twigg), to take the debate.
	"Education, education, education" was the mantra that we used to hear before the general election in 1997. The people of Leicestershire now regard that as all talk. I have had a lot of letters from teachers, among others, saying that they voted Labour in 1997 because they believed what they were told about "Education, education, education", which produces a hollow laugh.
	Almost exactly two years ago, on 4 March 2003, I led a debate on exactly the same topic in Westminster Hall, as the situation in my constituency and throughout Leicestershire was so dire. The Minister for the Cabinet Office replied to the debate, without great courtesy. Subsequently, I spent some time trying to get a meeting with the then Education Secretary, now the Home Secretary, who finally granted a meeting with a cross-party delegation. Contrary to many newspaper reports, he was extremely courteous and helpful. I have always found him to be so in my dealings with him. I put that on the record, as some people accuse him of being less than always cuddly, if I may put it that way. What I particularly remember him saying, referring to education funding in Leicestershire—he said it several times, and it was reported in newspapers—was that this must not happen again. Well, it has happened again, and for the third year running.
	This afternoon, the current Education Secretary promised clearer budgets and unparalleled stability for schools. We have heard it all before. As a bit of window dressing, the previous debate is unsurpassed, because if people examine the programme motion, they will see that it says:
	"Proceedings in the Standing Committee shall . . . be brought to a conclusion on Thursday 14th April 2005."
	Perhaps there will be a Committee discussing the Education Bill on 14 April, but somehow I doubt it. What we have heard today on the Education Bill is all fluff and nonsense, and electioneering by the Government.
	The Government have made many promises on education, including the undertaking to make education funding,
	"as fair, clear and simple as possible".
	The sentiment might be admirable, but it is nothing like the reality. I am speaking on behalf of the teachers, governors, parents and children of Leicestershire. They deserve a fairer deal.
	Leicestershire has the lowest education formula spending share per pupil of any LEA in the country. On average, the FSS per pupil in Leicestershire is 13.63 per cent. below the national average. Leicestershire county council tops up education spending by £10 million to make up for the inadequacy of Government funding. That is fine, but if Leicestershire were funded at the average for shire countries, a typical 200-place school would receive an extra £48,000. If it were funded at the same level as Leicester city, just across Braunstone lane, which divides the city from my constituency, such a school would receive a massive £126,000 more. That is a staggering imbalance. Were Leicestershire to receive the same funding level as the English average, it would receive £90,000 extra. Were the county to be funded to the same extent as the city, by central Government funding through the FSS, the county education authority would receive more than £50 million extra. One does not have to be well versed in accountancy or education funding to know the difference that £50 million can make.
	The consequences of this funding imbalance are clear. Performance is affected. This year, Leicestershire county council has had to negotiate with the regional Department for Education and Skills representative to lower its education targets because they have been set unrealistically high given the dire funding shortfall. That means, for example, delays in maintaining and replacing equipment, and less investment in new technology, inevitably, as there is less money to spend. Recruitment and retention become difficult. Schools in my constituency—I shall refer to one later—already face redundancies and staff shortfalls.
	Understandably, in such circumstances, low morale is a problem. I have been particularly occupied recently by letters from teachers, as the Under-Secretary will know, protesting about changes to their pensions. We understand that there is a demographic problem in relation to people living longer. Nevertheless, once somebody has signed up to employment conditions, changing those employment conditions unilaterally, as is happening with local government pensions and teachers' pensions, is, to put it mildly, undesirable. Furthermore, in small schools especially, classes are becoming larger, with less individual attention for children who need it.
	I suggest that the Government are failing in their assessment of basic entitlement by focusing too much on deprivation—entitlement is being assessed from the top down, rather than from the bottom up. The recommendation of the F40 group of the poorest-funded authorities, with which I am sure the Under-Secretary has had dealings, is that the entitlement should be determined on the basis of what it costs to educate a pupil. That seems to me to be pretty fair.
	We also think that the basic entitlement has been set too low. The Government have tried previously to blame inadequate funding on local authorities. As I have said, however, Leicestershire is spending an extra £10 million on education, and the Government claim that it does not pass on adequate funding to schools through passporting. That is grossly unfair, certainly to the LEA in Leicestershire. Recent Government policy has had the effect of reducing the authority of LEAs to direct the funding of schools in their area. The recent report of the Education and Skills Committee, "Public Expenditure on Education and Skills", criticised the Government for that, saying that the proposed changes would not help to solve the school funding problems. It went on to say that would lead inevitably to greater central Government interference.
	In addition, there is too great a disparity between LEAs. I have mentioned the differences, but let us consider the neighbouring counties with similar problems as well as good sides. In the coming year, Leicestershire is to receive on average £160 more per pupil while Lincolnshire, which is next door to the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton, will receive £247 more per pupil.

Andrew Robathan: I agree entirely—it is a question of much more than cash. I pay tribute, as the hon. Gentleman doubtless wants to do, to the Conservative-controlled LEA that is so well run that it has received praise. Moreover, David Parsons and Ivan Ould do an excellent job in managing the county council. If one can get a well-motivated teacher, the quality of teaching can be absolutely splendid even in a mud hut, with no fuss as to whether the air conditioning is set at the right temperature, for example. Indeed, I have witnessed as much in Africa, although in fact, the buildings there tend to be shacks with corrugated iron roofs. That said, in general we would rather have well-funded teaching as well.
	What this Government have done, for which I give them credit, is to increase teachers' pay. Teachers' pay is better than it was seven years ago—as one would hope, given that there has been some inflation since then. Indeed, MPs' pay is also better than it was then, but the hon. Members for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) and for Loughborough (Mr. Reed) would not know that because they were not here in the days of the previous Conservative Government.

Andy Reed: If the hon. Gentleman saw me moving, he would never describe me as giving a swan song, and I have never been described as a swan.
	On the specific point that he made, I am disappointed that he wants to make this into an issue in the general election in the stark terms in which he raised it. Unfortunately for him, if he did, it would only expose Tory education policies. First, the Tories want to cut £1 billion from local education authorities across the country, and we have no idea where that would come from. Furthermore, the pupil passport would probably take out another £1 billion from the state education system. If the hon. Gentleman looked at his own party's policy document, he would see that it refers to almost exactly the same funding formula. I was hoping that we could work on a cross-party basis on that, but will he explain to the voters of Blaby that his party's policies would be even worse for Leicestershire?

Andy Reed: I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan), who knows that I held a similar debate in Westminster Hall on 5 November, when he and the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan) were present. On that occasion, many of the same issues were raised with the Minister's predecessor, the hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Miliband), who is now the Minister for the Cabinet Office.
	It is a shame that the end of the speech given by the hon. Member for Blaby degenerated into a party political rant, but I suppose that that is somewhat unavoidable, given the likely election timetable. I, too, have started to get very interested, and for the same reason, in what policies the Tories are proposing on education. I urge the hon. Gentleman to reflect more on the consequences of some of those policies, particularly the pupil passport, which would be a disaster for the Leicestershire education system.

David Taylor: I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Blaby. He was not blowing his own trumpet when he said that he was part of a very non-partisan delegation to the present Home Secretary when he was Secretary of State for Education. We all contributed, and the hon. Gentleman was not partisan then, even if he is being partisan now. But what is going to happen in seven weeks' time must, I suppose, affect his attitude to these things.

Andrew Robathan: So we agree!

David Taylor: No doubt, the Whips would like such things to happen more often.
	I have raised one thing frequently with Education Ministers. In fact, I shall bring a delegation from a number of schools in the Ashby area to see the Minister's colleagues on 22 March—a week tomorrow, I think—to talk about funding and the issues raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough and the hon. Member for Blaby. However, the one thing that concerns me above all others in relation to the Government's plans for the world of education and the role of local education authorities—in this case, Leicester county council—is that there has been a great deal of talk about the direct funding of schools. The Government have not announced their intention in that regard, but it seems to be an open secret that, some time in a third term, that might emerge as a principle for education funding. I would regret that in a number of ways because it would result in the final enfeeblement of LEAs.
	Although some LEAs have not been successful, particularly in cities, our own LEA in the county of Leicestershire has been a leading-edge authority. It has been successful in community education and in funding music and the arts over a long period. It has been regarded as one of the leading authorities in handling special needs. Indeed, it was—and bravely for an authority that had been Conservative controlled for a long time—in the vanguard of comprehensivisation long before it became a national requirement.
	I would regret the enfeeblement and disbandment of the local education authority of Leicestershire. As far as I am aware, Labour has never controlled it—certainly not in the post-war years. We were in the lead on the authority for long periods between 1974 and 1997, but we never had a majority. My remarks are therefore not driven by any political motive, but I would regret the ending of the LEA even though direct funding would at long last tackle the problems that underpin what we are debating. The problems of pockets of deprivation in what is an otherwise prosperous area would, at least and at last, be tackled effectively by the schools in Loughborough, Coalville, Hinckley and in parts of the constituency of the hon. Member for Blaby. They would receive the funding that is appropriate for their particular needs.
	I shall listen closely to the Minister's response. Although it may be invisible to us, I am sure that he has hidden about his person a cheque, which is dated tomorrow, in which the words "Leicestershire county council" appear in the column for the payee. I look forward to hearing that good news.